Elusive Orange Beings and Garden Planet Blues

(From the Flower Child's Garden Planet Manual:)

"Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I'll meet you there."- Rumi 

 

 

There are dozens of them, bright orange, floating into view, between the layers of gray. As I stare, they just kind of fade away. All I see now is the blue of the sky...

 

...reflected in the pond . There must have been fifty of the glistening frisky creatures in the nearby cloud of orange, a school of floating carrots, and a couple dozen more in the second cloud, in the little mirage-flotilla a foot or two away from the first school.

 

 

I think they must first conjure up a swirl of pond muck around themselves, and then, on cue and in formation, and seemingly without even moving, they just subtly drop down into their cloud of camouflage.

 

 The pond abides all summer, but I observe the heron come by for fast food several times as the water level drops. No telling how many times this happens when I'm not watching. One day in just a minute or three, I watch the heron catch several carrot sized orange fish, flashing golden and silver in the sun. Too easy, I say!

 

So we mow and water and bring in two new pickup loads of beach sand. The nice soft dry kind. The fish love this. They come out and nibble on things around the slightly expanded pond edge and I think the sand gives them a taste of the ocean.

 

"Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes." - Walt Whitman 

The Virgo Job Days of August

Where I live we have global warming, but that just means in this cool climate, that our hottest month has a few really hot days. As we are about to go into the month of Virgo, the practical sign, we are in a hot spell now. I love it.

 

When the weather map turns deep red, it's cleaning time. Never mind spring cleaning, turn on that free solar powered super heat for Summer Cleaning! This is the time when I haul out all the dusty musty things, and wash them and put them in the glorious sunshine. Forget going on vacation, stay home and get to work!

In this wet climate of the Great Northwest, where mold and mildew are always a hazard, you can bring everything outside to dry out in August. This is the kind of place where, when the sun comes out for a few minutes some winter months, we all run outside and stand in it!

 

Heat waves are when we can play in the water. We can get all wet, and get things clean at the same time. (Sorry, drought constrained Californians who aren't allowed to water.) We can hose things off and leave them out to dry, and they actually do! So now it is time to clean out all of the dark corners, to seal up the now dried out wooden structures with linseed oil or paint, wash and hang up curtains and other large washable things. We can put wet pillows, rugs, even futons out and have them clean and dry soon, without resort to fire or electricity. It is amazing how much free heat is available and all the things we can use it for.

 

If we have a yard, a garden, (or container garden as I do) we can water ourselves too. I always love to play with the mist setting on my garden hose. I stand with the sun behind me and paint rainbows in the sky. My spray paint is water. I administer mist-ic initiations to my friends in this manner:)

 

I also keep a bathtub full of water and dip whenever I feel too hot. I feel so grateful to have pure clean abundant water here. It is truly a sacred treasure. I wonder when the humans will really understand how precious and valuable pure clean water is. 

 

“Nothing is more wonderful than the art of being free, but nothing is harder to learn how to use than freedom.”-Alexis de Tocqueville.       

The Kitten

"You can do no great things. Only small things with great love" -Mother Therese

Every fiber studio needs a cat, of course. Wilbur Riverpebble fits the bill nicely. Performs all of the cat functions. He of course supervises my fiber work in a very paws on manner. Now that he has discovered the location of his basket of toys, he jumps up and rummages around until he finds his favorite toy, a felt ball, always the same one, pulls it out, puts it in his mouth, and jumps off to go play with it. 

 

And he fetches! He does this from his first day here, and I have been working with him to do it on command. He also shakes hands/paws. The trick to teaching a kitty tricks is to notice what they do, name it, then request and reward it. This kitty is motivated by praise, some are more excited by food. 

I find the praise motivated ones to be better for teaching tricks to.  I also kind of randomly lavish praise upon this little one just for being there while not doing anything he shouldn't be doing, every few minutes or so. He just loves that, so he keeps good track of my movements. With kitties you never do aversive training, only positive reinforcement.

 

I find my kitten online. The day I look, there are four batches of kittens on offer. A "rehoming" fee is requested by most, ranging from $200 to $20 to $10 to free. Almost all of the kittens are tuxedo, black and white, so I figure it must be tuxedo kitten week. 

So who to call? The two hundred dollar ad sounds whiny and grumpy, like their kittens are a lot a trouble to care for. How to find the perfect match, I wonder. My criteria are these two: the kitten must be hand raised, and its mother has to be a good mouser. This is after all the countryside, and this would be a country kitty. 

The ten dollar kitten litter wins. It has all tuxedo kittens, but the ad gives a profile of each one, describing the special characteristics of each kitten, their personalities, fur type, and cute markings. This person obviously knows and loves them well!

I arrive at the place where they were born. It's a rundown government subsidized housing complex. The apartment has a black guy sitting out on the doorstep smoking a tobacco vape pipe. He has that deep dark skin color like an African, and he has a beard. He looks like some kind of cool jazz dude. 

 Inside the apartment it is smoky with tobacco, and the person I talked to on the phone appears with the kittens. She looks about fifteen years old, and she is as porcelain-pale as he is dark, with long white-blond hair that hangs limp, like straw. It is noon, and she looks like maybe she just woke up. School is out for the summer.

 

I ask if the mother cat is a good mouser. Oh yes, she replies, she brings in big rats! I feel sad for these people that have to deal with the big rats. They both are sweet gentle spirits. Black and white, just like my kitty. Wilbur picks me out. He is the mellow one of the litter, they tell me. It is true. Wilbur plays hard and fast, but then he relaxes and cuddles and purrs just right. Good kitty!

 

Omniart Notebook July 2016

 

Summer brings the urge to be playing outside with tree branches.

In my life this is also a moment of new things, kittens and babies, and tiny old great-grannies. Kittens and babies are growing while old great grannies seem to be shrinking...

 

I feel drawn to basics. Handmade looms, cheap looms, simple looms. Even simpler looms. Small looms. Tiny looms. 

(This one is just warp wrapped around two sticks tied together, with clouds woven directly on:)

 

(I have no idea what this thing will turn out to be:)

 

A challenge arises! How many looms and other fiber projects can I juggle at one time? It is a matter of how thin I can spread myself. Why would I want to do that? Multitasking is supposedly a thing most people do very badly. 

 

But really? How do we define that? Is it not natural in the world for all sorts of things to constantly swirl all around us? In fact, linear-ness is an unnatural concept we impose upon a chaotic world so we can have power to do stuff. A tool only. An arrow of linear intent we send off from our bow of thinking. We made it up.

 

Just because linear mono-tasking may be, on average, measurably more efficient, as defined by speed, at accomplishing one particular, separate, study-able task, so what?! What about a garden, a class of students, a group of musicians? Each one is a veritable multitasking super swirl.

 

I wonder how it might be to sort of dance through the day of thoughts and things like that. So, I set as many fiber projects going at the same time as I can...here are a few:

(This is on a 24" wide peg loom. I'm not sure sure what it will be yet:)

 

I start this tapestry loom sampler in silver and gray. This is a cheap little loom I got online but it changes sheds nicely.

 

 

I have it set like an art canvas on an easel from the art supply store so I can stand up to weave. The easel is a darling French made portable that folds into a neat box with a handle. It's designed for "plein air" outdoor painting and works well for all sorts of my painting: yarn tapestry, ipad painting, and regular painting.

 

I crack out the box of gifting looms that I made summer before last. Each one is a unique peg loom I designed around a small box or bag, then I drilled pegs and holes into, and then decorated with pictures, paint, and glitter. I select one to try out. What fun! It feels like a gift. I have never actually used most of them. 

 

 

This one is a real pleasure to use. It has the pegs set close together and they are extremely long. So I am able to see half my pictorial tapestry style weaving before I must pull the pegs for the first time. 

 

One stick loom idea fails. Too much warp tension keeps pulling it out of whack. Bad design. 

 

But I end up taking it apart and using the sticks as a frame for the peg loom piece.

 

Problem is, I get really into whatever I may be doing right now, and darned if I don't just keep finishing things! Like juggling balls that grow wings and fly off after a while.

 

In one day, this art work (above) just pops out of the frame loom that I made last month. It's like a momentum has built up...

 

This little yellow and gray cell phone holder rolls off the frame loom too.

 

Now I'm trying the BIGGEST piece ever on the infinite S shaped knitting loom. It will be like a giant rainbow flag. Or knitted blanket. This baby can knit ten feet wide or so, depending on the stitch and yarn type. I can make it as long as I want, maybe say, twenty feet?! So far I'm just on purple...

 

 

I teach myself a new and very silly fiber artist's skill, how to make pom poms! I decide to attack the basket of chartreuse yarn and end up with a nest of greenish yellow pom poms. 

 

I spin up little bits of hand dyed mohair locks to use in the 12"square nail loom.

 

 I learn how to weave squares of several sizes on a loom of nails. 

 

 

They slide off the nails with already finished edges; nice. It is really fast to make a tiny 2" square and a length of yarn only measuring from one outstretched hand to the other!  

 

Talk about instant gratification weaving. Now if I could just figure out what to do with all these little squares..

 

Now I'm starting a hook rug surface using this adjustable stand thingy that I got from a fellow who makes them. It holds your backing up with side brushes so you can access it from below and work on a table or lap. I wonder how that will work. 

 

So, these are some of the things I'm juggling in my fiber game this summer...

Summer Pond Notes

“A morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books.”

-Walt Whitman

 

What a beautiful planet I live on! 

I admire the beauty of this early summer evening with the sunset sky colors reflected in the pond, and set like a fire opal in a foamy flower bracelet. We mowed around the pond in early spring and now the white daisies ring the pond. They stand waist high, forming a solid white carpet of velvety petals trembling in the breeze. Quite suitable for fairies to dance upon! The deer mill around with their heads sticking improbably up out of the flowers.

 

I've noticed that when you scrape around on the earth, things grow back after a while. But what exactly grows back depends on the place. In some places you get blackberries, thistles, or even a big old crop of poison oak. But here, you get a whole lot of daisies!

 

The herons still visit. They stop in for fast food. I see one swallowing a large goldfish and then lifting into the air on great blue grey wings.

 

The El Niño wetness that breaks the drought a bit brings wildflowers twice as tall, three times as diverse, and four times as numerous as usual! I see them everywhere on my morning walks. 

 

Sometimes I feel so depressed about the ongoing damage we are doing to the natural world. But a spring like this one lifts my spirits, because I behold also the resilience of this highly tuned, self balancing system of nature that we humans have evolved up within, and are waking up to. It is as if the flowers have been waiting for a year like this, and they spring up in joy when the rains return.

 

I wonder if, a hundred years from now, we will see a world that is a garden planet, like we could create here, or a technological prison planet of control and repression. The choice is ours...

 

"The universe is not a hierarchy. It is a jungle wild fractal swirliarchy." - Omni